Communications scholarship faces a convergent crisis. Research on networks includes the role of information networks in supporting social movements, networked civil society, the information society, and new forms of communication. But while communications literature utilizes a variety of approaches to describe the impact of networked communications, a dearth of technical expertise permeates scholarship. Despite the discourse on networks potentially bridging previously distinct disciplines, the lack of a fundamental understanding of communications networks and relationships between technical and socio-political networks remains a consistent gap. This thesis will investigate the extent that opposition to the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Europe constitute a networked public sphere. Through studying the role of civl society and the networked public in the European ACTA debate, the horizontal and vertical dimensions of socio-political and communications technology networks are not only illuminated, but the importance of analyzing the mechanisms through which vertical hierarchies enclose the public sphere become abundantly clear. This research provides the foundation for an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the relationship between information technology and socio-political networks and offers lessons for information policy makers, communications scholars, and networked civil society within the context of European democracy.

Today is an exciting time to be a political activist in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly for the technically inclined. New media technologies including the mobile phone, the Internet, and social media are proliferating rapidly and their potential as potent political tools is being realized. While 2012's Arab Spring in North Africa captivated the world, similar campaigns have been occurring south of the Sahara both before and since. But the embrace of social media for political ends raises the question of how, if at all, these new media actually perturb the political landscape. These questions have been well-studied in Western contexts, but remain virtually unexplored in developing regions where traditional media are scarcer, democracies are younger, and the effect of social media on politics has the potential to be quite distinct. This dissertation explores these questions by focusing on social media use during elections in Nigeria and Liberia in 2011. It asks how social media impacted the democratic process during these key events, and compares social media discourse to formal election monitoring operations. The findings suggest that given sufficient civil-society coordination, social media can be an effective tool for electoral scrutiny. Furthermore, for this and other reasons, it appears that social media has the potential to emerge as a key influence on public faith in electoral processes. Based on these results, it is further argued that social media's true disruptive power in developing world contexts lies in its ability to transcend the economics of scarcity that have dominated traditional media in such contexts. This observation is offered as an extension to the networked public sphere theory of Yochai Benkler that frames this work.

This study examines the potential for the Internet, or more specifically the World Wide Web, to enhance local democracy and local governance by providing a networked public sphere. It is located in post-industrial theories of social and political transformation, which see a new, uncertain and complex society emerging which may transform the political significance of the 'local'. Whilst a number of causes are identified as culpable in this process, it is the ICT revolution and the development of the Web in particular, that is seen as possessing a democratising potential that, if realised, may bring greater resilience to geographic localities. The potential of the Web to provide a new networked public sphere is based upon contested views that its topography, its hyperlinked structure, can enable the ordinary citizen's voice to be heard above those that traditionally dominate political discourse. However, there has been no attention paid to this potential being realised at a local governance level within which, this study argues, a favourable environment should exist for a local online networked public sphere to prosper. Accordingly, this prospect is empirically explored here through a case study of the use made of the Web by a variety of local civic, political and institutional actors during a 2008 local (Manchester, UK) referendum on introducing the largest traffic congestion charging scheme in the country. This research applies a distinctive mixed method approach within a conceptually defined internet mediated domain of local governance. Relational Hyperlink Analysis is used to analyse the structural significance of the captured congestion charge. This analysis uses Social Network Analysis (SNA) and an associated statistical technique, Exponential Random Graph Modelling (ERGM) to render the network visible and understandable. To further illuminate how the network was used by local civic and institutional actors involved in the referendum the research draws upon a network ethnography approach which uses SNA to identify subjects for qualitative investigation. The study offers some evidence of the Web providing 'just enough' links in this local context to suggest the structural existence of a networked public sphere. However, further evidence from the narratives and the statistical model paint an alternative picture. This suggests that, in the main, hyperlinking behaviour and use made of the network corresponds to a 'politics as usual' scenario where cliques are more likely to proliferate and powerful economic and media interests dominate online as they do offline. If the ordinary citizen's voice is to be heard in this context then there is a requirement for policy intervention to establish a trusted local networked public sphere or online civic space, independent of vested interests but linked to the local governance decision making process. In addition to this there is a requirement for greater education, particularly aimed at senior local governance policy makers, in the culture of online engagement.

Social media has become ubiquitous in modern society. Both as a way to connect with others and as a popular form of entertainment and relaxation. This dependency on social media can lead both to beneficial and adverse consequences. A common concern about social media use relates to how active or passive a user is, with some indicating that passive behaviours, such as absently scrolling through the feed are particularly harmful. Research that investigates social media’s adverse effect on the individual depending on the user’s engagement level currently suffers from problems with categorisation, methodology and philosophy. This thesis sought to fill this research gap. Its research questions were accordingly: “What motivates adult users to use social media at various levels of engagement?” and “What factors of social media use impact adult users’ adverse emotional outcomes?”   To answer this research question, the study utilised a methodology of focus group discussion with pre-existing social groups consisting of adults aged 20-30, a demographic with potentially unique insight into their relationship with social media. This was followed by thematic analysis which in turn was placed within a framework of Use & gratification theory and the networked public. These theories were chosen since the research adheres to concepts of the active audience and disagrees with conceptualisations of the social media user as passive. Instead, low to high levels of engagement is used to describe individual behaviours. 4 main themes (Level of engagement, Problematic use, category of use and regulation) were discovered as well as 13 sub-themes.     The study discovered that individuals would use social media at several levels of engagement simultaneously but that behaviours could be assembled into four archetypes: Consumption (low level of engagement which included behaviours such as mindless scrolling), Lurking (low level of engagement which included both private and public browsing), socialisation (medium to high level of engagement which included communication), and production (high level of engagement which included publishing content). Different levels of engagement were associated with different adverse emotional outcomes which commonly occurred when users failed to effectively regulate their use or encountered harmful content. It was discovered that users encountered these issues largely due to the platform’s incentivisation through subtle and not so subtle means such as media design and notifications.

With more political and social discourse taking place online, particularly on social media, theorists have started labeling digital communicative realms as “online public spheres.” However, with the modern public sphere comes modern challenges to political communication; a core antagonist of which is political bots. Political bots are automated accounts that produce content and interact with individuals on political topics on social networks. In this thesis, I analyzed the presence of political bots on Twitter during the 2022 Swedish general election, and by examining the content posted by the bots, I investigated whether they jeopardized democratic functions of the online public sphere by publishing misrepresentation (i.e., artificially increasing the popularity of political actors and political ideas). The analysis uncovered significant bot presence during the 2022 Swedish general election; more than one-fifth of all election-related content was produced by bots, ~90% of which produced misrepresentation. I concluded that political bots jeopardized democratic functions of the online public sphere during the 2022 Swedish general election.